Читать книгу Books and Religious Devotion - Allan F. Westphall - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIRISH AMERICAN PRINT CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A PRIVATE LIBRARY
This Book was printed for me.
—Thomas Connary, undated note on the title page of Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales
This chapter provides an overview of the books in the library of Thomas Connary, purchased, read, and annotated by him in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The focus will be on him as a member of the Irish expatriate in America and, especially, on the underexplored part of American book history and reading history which is the Irish diaspora print culture. Chapter 2 examines Connary’s complex practices of book use, but first I want to consider what the contents of his library tell us about the type of reading material made available by Irish American book publishers catering to Irish expatriate communities.
The surviving collection of books and papers amassed by this farmer from rural New Hampshire provides a particularly interesting perspective on the energetic publishing program through which a trickle of Irish Catholic book publications in the first decades of the nineteenth century became a veritable flood in the 1840s and ’50s and thereafter, emerging from the Irish Catholic printing centers in America such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This was a print initiative preceded, and in large measure made possible, by a Protestant print and marketing revolution from the early years of the nineteenth century, in which Bible and religious tract societies became large-scale, nonprofit manufacturers and distributors of print. Endeavoring to reach every American with Protestant Bibles and didactic tract literature, this movement paved the way for the mass production of print in America through the use of the latest manufacturing technologies, especially stereotype printing.1
Thomas Connary systematically acquired the products of early Irish and Catholic publishing houses in America in a way that was motivated by a sense of nostalgia for “Old Ireland” as much as by the perceived practical, catechetic, and devotional needs of the head of a larger household. While one should always exercise caution in claiming the representative nature of such personal collections, which are the products of individual tastes and the contingencies of availability, such caution may be particularly urgent here: the sheer number of books collected by Connary, of which just a smaller part can be surveyed here, might well have been outside the reach of his fellow Irish Americans of lesser means, and certainly of those with less determination.
The library of Thomas Connary is characterized above all by its clear utilitarian function and orientation toward practical and devotional guidance within a domestic setting. It shows how mundane concerns of household management and a general active interest in history, politics, and geography blended with spiritual ambition and an interest in moral instruction to provide a rationale for the acquisition of books and other reading materials. There is little place for recreational reading material, by which we may understand publications indulged in for the sake of pleasure (including lighter popular fiction, but not exclusively) rather than moral or religious edification. We also find very little of the earliest pre-Famine body of Irish American writing, which is a particularly rich and resourceful literature of folklore, history, novels, poetry, comedy, and satire and has been expertly surveyed in Charles Fanning’s Irish Voice in America.2 Far more prevalent in Connary’s library is the Irish immigrant print output of the 1840s and ’50s—a uniquely American tradition of ethnic writing designed to guide the Irish in their new setting. This literature was often prone to humorless didacticism and a sentimental moralizing rhetoric, but it also offered real guidance and emotional appeal to many, especially as much of it sought to kindle a devotional Irish Catholicism.3
The appendix provides a catalogue of the contents of Connary’s library, and it conveys an impression of the reading material generally provided to an Irish immigrant readership with a view toward nourishing and reinforcing Catholic identity. Four books in Connary’s possession were especially representative of the owner’s interests as a book collector and reader, and characteristic, too, of the wave of Irish American publishing that sought to make suitable Irish Catholic literature obtainable in affordable editions. Published by some of the key houses catering to Irish readers in America, these titles give a sense of what was most often the strongly pious nature of these publication initiatives—as well as of the rather tense sectarian context, in which a diasporic print culture existed to offset predominant Protestant literature, often perceived to be anti-Catholic.
F. Lewis [Louis of Granada], The Sinner’s Guide (Philadelphia: Henry M’Grath, 1845)
Thomas Connary’s copy of The Sinner’s Guide, by the famed Dominican theologian and preacher Louis of Granada (1505–1588), is a cloth-bound, dark brown octavo volume with debossed ornament on the front and back boards and a gilded spine depicting a cross surrounded by elaborate floral ornament. The binding shows signs of heavy and frequent use. As the book was regularly pulled from the shelf, its binding shows considerable shelf wear and the head of the spine is missing.
Originally entitled Guía de Pecadores, Louis’s voluminous exhortation to virtue and obedience was published in Badajoz, Spain, in 1555. In his admiring 1913 entry on Louis of Granada in the Catholic Encyclopedia, J. B. O’Connor finds in the Guía “a smooth, harmonious style of purest Spanish idiom which has merited for it the reputation of a classic, and an unctuous eloquence that has made it a perennial source of religious inspiration.”4 Indeed, being marked in its English translation by a particularly intimate style of repeated appeals to the reader, homely analogies, and frequent invocation, the work stands out among a flood of early Spanish ascetic and penitential works, and it achieved considerable popularity throughout Europe. Its significant influence on the practical morality and prudent regulation of St. Francis of Sales (1567–1622) is discernable in several works in Connary’s library, including St. Francis’s Spiritual Conferences and Introduction to the Devout Life.
The Sinner’s Guide is one of many titles in Connary’s library that are translated works, often of much older Continental European religious texts. Other translations in Connary’s collection include The Practice of Christian and Religious Perfection by St. Alphonsus Rodriguez (1532–1617) and James Balmes’s (1810–1848) Fundamental Philosophy, along with four titles by St. Francis of Sales that were often reprinted by American Catholic presses. Together with a wealth of translations of contemporary Catholic works, mostly German and French, these writings were esteemed on account of their unambiguous didacticism and/or devotional spirituality. They bear witness to what was a publication and translation initiative targeted at Irish Catholic expatriates perceived to be urgently in need of spiritual and moral edification.
Published in Philadelphia in 1845 by Henry M’Grath, who brought out numerous Catholic devotional and apologetic works, The Sinner’s Guide is referred to by Connary as “an old Book,” and he notes that “I had the same work in my native home, Old Ireland.” This title is thus one of the many that Connary was familiar with from his early years in Ireland and which he (re-)acquired when he settled in the United States.5 The earliest annotation by Connary in the volume is a decoratively swung ownership inscription on the first page of the preface: “Thomas Connary’s Book, Stratford Town, Coös County, New Hampshire June 27 anno 1876.” It is possible that the book was purchased a long time before such inscription, as is often the case.
That Connary’s copy of The Sinner’s Guide was particularly precious to him is evident from a brief handwritten note dated January 12, 1881, and inserted into the book before the title page: “I will continue to love this Book as a good Book, as long as God will be good in every respect—it plainly represents divine Truth in every respect.” Connary spent considerable time and effort on decorating this volume, which contains more than fifteen inserted pages, double-sided and densely written, of prayers, religious reflections, and miscellaneous recordings, many of which will be discussed in the following chapters. The flyleaves and endpapers accommodate a particularly rich selection of Bible quotations, prayers, poetry, newspaper fragments, and printed illustrations of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, all written or pasted in by Connary.
Thomas H. Kinane, The Dove of the Tabernacle (New York: P. M. Haverty, 1876)
Thomas H. Kinane (1835–1913), parochial vicar of Templemore, North Tipperary, and dean of Cashel from 1888 to 1913, published his most famous devotional work under the somewhat fanciful but memorable title The Dove of the Tabernacle; or The Love of Jesus in the Most Holy Eucharist with J. F. Fowler in Dublin in 1873. The text appeared the same year from P. M. Haverty in New York, a bookseller, importer, and publisher of Irish-related material (including the popular Haverty’s Irish-American Illustrated Almanac), and it quickly went through several editions in Europe and America. (The twenty-eighth edition was published with M. H. Gill in Dublin in 1884.) Kinane’s work was an immediate best seller, undoubtedly due in no small measure to its strong promotion by the Irish Catholic Magazine—and the fact that it appeared with the authoritative testimony of no fewer than fourteen members of the Irish episcopate, as well as a glowing preface by Patrick Leahey, archbishop of Cashel.
A contemporary review in the Irish Monthly characterized The Dove of the Tabernacle as “the work of zeal achieved amidst the labours of a rural parish” and commended it for the “fullness and accuracy with which the Scripture arguments for the Real Presence are expounded in what is meant to be merely a simple popular treatise of devotion.”6 Being first and foremost intended to inflame pious sensitivity and fervent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Kinane’s work presents, in a detailed yet accessible manner, scriptural arguments for the Real Presence, wrapping these in ardent prayers and exclamations. Didactic and catechetic expositions are followed by pious resolutions and admonitions to self-scrutiny, such as the following:
Resolution.
MY dearest Jesus! Thy church, where Thou dost ever dwell, is as holy as the Sanctuary at Loretto. Year after year, O Lord, we read, with sighs and tears, of some sanctuary profaned, some altar or tabernacle containing the “Holy of Holies” desecrated. I adore Thy patience. To try to make reparation for all, and for my own irreverences, I resolve never to be guilty, either in word, or look, or dress, or gesture, of anything unworthy of the sanctity of Thy house, and always “to reverence Thy sanctuary.” “Thy church, O Lord, is the house of God and gate of heaven” (Gen., xxviii. 17).
Divine Host! Make me faithful to this resolution.7
Not only does Connary provide affirmation by signing his name below this declaration in Kinane’s text (as he does to declarations throughout the volume), but he also repeats in the margin in his own hand the sentence which must have intrigued him: “My dearest Jesus! Thy church where Thou dost ever dwell, is as holy as the Sanctuary at Lorette. Thomas Connary.”
Connary’s copy of The Dove of the Tabernacle, printed by P. M. Haverty in 1876, is a dainty and compact sixteenmo size (17 × 10 cm) of 323 pages, bound in red cloth with decorated black borders to the boards. At the center of the front and back covers is the central insignia of the Sacred Heart wrapped in the Crown of Thorns, from the top of which appears the Cross amid flames. On the front pastedown is evidence of how Connary obtained this volume: the original price sticker reads, “Nicholas Williams, Catholic Bookseller, Boston, 75c.” The covers of the volume are rubbed and show severe wear to edges and spine; the hinges have cracked and several single pages have separated. One of Connary’s many penned notes in this volume is written on the final endpaper and dated “3 O’clock in the afternoon, June 30th 1896,” stating that “children destroyed a portion of this Book. Now I mark it again as my own beautiful Book.” Judging from the amount of wear and damage, this was one of the books in most frequent use by Connary. Its status as a devotional best seller commended by Catholic Ireland must have been of particular significance to him. Over twenty years, from 1878 to 1898, he inserted into the volume more than thirty handwritten pages of prayers and elaborate decoration, as well as appeals and religious exhortations intended for reading by his family.
The first English translation of the Spanish Catholic priest Jaume Llucià Balmes’s (1810–1848) Filosofia Fundamental was that published by D. & J. Sadlier from their offices in William Street on lower Manhattan in New York. First offered for sale in 1856, Balmes’s comprehensive systematic philosophy was regularly reprinted by the family-owned publishing house through the latter half of the nineteenth century, with approximately one new print appearing each decade.
When the brothers Denis and James Sadlier moved from Ireland to New York in 1832 (one year before Connary made the journey) to publish works addressing the spiritual and educational needs of an exponentially growing Irish community, they founded what by the early 1850s would be the largest publishing house in America.8 Among its earliest publishing endeavors were a Catholic Bible (the Douai-Rheims version), a German-language New Testament, and Alban Butler’s Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints. The Sadliers also eventually acquired the New York Tablet, an important Catholic weekly newspaper in which a large proportion of the stories and novels of the prolific Mary Anne Sadlier, James Sadlier’s wife, appeared in serial form. Romantic in expression, her writings were inspirational and edifying to many Irish American Catholics.9
With Balmes’s Fundamental Philosophy we are at the more intellectually challenging end of the Sadlier range. In this comprehensive exposition of the scholastic system of thought, Balmes adopted and adapted the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to the intellectual debates of his day. Devoting his early university years to the exclusive study of St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica and commentaries thereon (only occasionally allowing himself to indulge in Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity), Balmes produced an elaborate rationalist system of epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics designed to put logic back on track after what was seen as a dominant and damaging strand of Cartesian skepticism in European thinking.10 Other notable writings by Balmes include a translation, with an introduction, of the maxims of St. Francis of Sales (1840) and the important Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the Civilization of Europe (1844; also in Connary’s library). The latter was his intellectual and restrained, even tolerant, critique of Protestantism, which quickly saw translation into French, Italian, German, and English.11
That Thomas Connary was interested in Balmes’s biography is evident from a newspaper clipping dated, in Connary’s hand, March 18, 1882, and pasted to the final contents pages of the first volume. Written by an anonymous “veritas” from Ellsworth, Wisconsin, it lists in encyclopedic style the main achievements of the “learned theologian, profound philosopher, and enlightened publicist.” This is one of numerous paste-ins in the volume from different papers and magazines on subjects as varied as the death of Captain Nelson, who accompanied Henry M. Stanley on one of his African expeditions; the disposition of the ideal farmer’s wife (“ever presenting the bright side, and concealing nothing but her own sorrow”); and the unprecedented crisis between the Egyptian Khedive and the British government following the British dismissal of the newly established Fakhri cabinet in January 1893.
Connary’s copy of Balmes is in two large, compact octavo volumes totaling 1,081 pages, bound in blue cloth with blind-stamped pattern on the boards and gilt title on the spine. The volumes contain much of Connary’s own writing in the form of religious reflections, transcribed poetry and letters to and from local postmasters, as well as several addresses to his children that instruct them to preserve his books and annotations. The annotations and inserted pages date from March 1871 to March 1897, with a particular concentration in the summer of 1881. The earliest marking is in the form of an ownership note on the first page of the introduction: “Thomas Connary’s Property, Stratford, Coös County, New Hampshire—March 28th 1871.” Some marginal notations serve to direct Connary’s reading, as we see for instance on page 1: “see and read pages 31 and 32, Chapter IV, Section 51 of this Book.” But, such directives aside, very few of the annotations or inserted pages pertain directly to content in the text. The fact that the two volumes show little wear, apart from moderate shelf wear, suggests that Connary may have done little regular reading of Balmes’s Fundamental Philosophy. However, when Balmes formulates the epistemic certainties of his commonsense philosophy (offered as an antidote to the Cartesian project of universal doubt), they resonate very strongly with the assured proclamatory tone in which Connary’s writings assert belief and moral conviction. Especially appealing to Connary is Balmes’s firmly declared adherence to the Catholic faith throughout his Fundamental Philosophy, not least when the Spanish author concludes that “[a] careful study of the objections brought against Christianity, lays bare a truth confirmed by the history of eighteen centuries; the most weighty objections against Catholicity, instead of proving any thing against it, involve a proof which confirms it.”12 Later I will suggest that the tolerance of intellectual and religious difference that characterizes Balmes’s writing finds a parallel in the reflections of Connary.
If the family-owned Sadlier publishing house was one of the key providers of spiritual and educational material to a rapidly growing Irish American Catholic community, that founded by Patrick Donahoe, who emigrated from Ireland to Boston in 1821 at ten years of age, was surely another. This indefatigable entrepreneur and deft salesman established his flourishing Boston business by producing a vast range of affordable Catholic publications and a very popular news magazine (and, additionally, offering a wide range of Catholic devotional paraphernalia). One of his characteristic publishing initiatives was his series of Catholic Books for the Poor, consisting of a selection of thirty-two-page pamphlets in the small thirty-twomo format (14 × 9 cm), each with the life of a saint, “embellished with a splendid engraving,” and priced at three cents. It was Donahoe’s declared ambition to remain dedicated “in the endeavor to reproduce, in a cheap form, many of the very valuable works issued from time to time in Europe, which, from the high price when imported, or otherwise, are out of the reach of the majority of Catholics of America, and also . . . to extend and bring out, at a small price, the copyright works of American writers.”13
One example of Donahoe’s European Catholic material is Louis Gaston de Ségur’s polemical Plain Talk about the Protestantism of To-Day, published in 1868, which bears the imprimatur of the bishop of the diocese of Boston and the testimony of the archbishop of Baltimore: “Plain Talk I regard as an excellent Book for circulation. It will do an immense good.” Appearing with the characteristic ten pages of the publisher’s advertisements at the rear of the volume, the preliminary title page also becomes a place of advertisement, carrying a price of 25 cents, and the further reduced prices of “twenty-five copies, $5; fifty copies, $10; one hundred copies, $15.” One of the advertisement pages states triumphantly about Ségur’s Plain Talk,
The Cheapest Book Ever Published!!!
MR. DONAHOE has endeavored for years to furnish books at as cheap rates as the Protestant booksellers, and much lower than the publications of the Catholic publishers. This he has been enabled to do, from the fact that his publications are manufactured in his own buildings, and receive his personal superintendence. It is a mistake, therefore, to say that “Catholics have not cheap books.” It may be that other publishers do not issue cheap books, but the charge against our establishment is not correct. And if the “gropers after truth” will give us a call, or send by letter, they will find our books are cheaper than any in the country. We challenge comparison. Remember, we allude to OUR OWN PUBLICATIONS.
This is the confident voice of one of North America’s most successful and enterprising nineteenth-century publishers catering to the rising Catholic population, and it shows how the highest significance is attached to the availability and affordability of books within the divided religious scene of New England. For an ambitious publisher like Donahoe, it became a matter of principle to match the achievement of Protestant societies like the American Tract Society and the American Bible Society, which had considerable success in making books cheap and plentiful through power printing, stereotyping, and systematic distribution.14
The vast majority of Donahoe’s publications can be classed as devotional and catechetic. Most of these were offered in inexpensive octavo or twelvemo cloth-bound volumes, with a few titles—chiefly standard Catholic prayer books likely to be valued as aids to personal and public devotion—offered in a wide range of bindings. One example of the latter is St. Joseph’s Manual, Containing a Selection of Prayers for Private and Public Devotion, published by Donahoe in 1853 in a small, sturdy eighteenmo volume (16.5 × 10 cm) of 696 pages, and offered for sale in seventeen different binding options, ranging from “strongly bound in sheep” priced at fifty cents to the de luxe “velvet, mountings with morocco case” at ten dollars.15
In 1856, Patrick Donahoe published Travels in England, France, Italy, and Ireland, by the Rev. George Foxcroft Haskins (1806–1872), in a 292-page octavo volume.16 Haskins, who converted to Catholicism in 1840 and was ordained a priest in 1844, was founder and rector of the House of the Angel Guardian in Boston, a school for orphan and destitute Catholic boys aged nine to sixteen. He obtained considerable state funds and donations for his welfare initiatives, with many donations coming from the non-Catholic community and demonstrating his function as a “liaison between Catholics and secular leaders.”17 On more than one occasion, Haskins toured England, Ireland, France, Italy, and Belgium with a view to visiting orphanages, reform schools, and other charitable institutions, and these tours provided the material for his two travel books.18
In the Boston of Haskins’s day, as Peter Holloran has shown, social welfare and charity for children had become determined by the sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics and the formation of a dual institutional system. It is this background of sectarianism, and a common rhetoric of overt indignation, which set the theme for Haskins’s Travels. In fact, as Haskins asserts in his introduction, the very rationale for the publication is to offset the Protestant travel descriptions that dominated the market:
The Catholics of this country, though for the most part poor, are fond of reading. Many religious works, and some few histories, and tales, and political essays are the principal books within their reach. Books of travels they have none. With regard to the customs and doings of other nations they have little means of obtaining information except from Protestant tourists. But their productions, even the best of them, are so well seasoned with sneers and misrepresentations, perhaps unintentional, of the practices, ceremonies, customs, &c., of Catholic countries, that, instead of being instructive, they are pernicious and dangerous.19
The descriptions that follow predictably laud the superior virtue, philanthropy, and religious observance of the Catholics whom Haskins encounters on his tours, while what is diagnosed as Protestant ignorance and decadence is described in a manner aloof and patronizing. An anecdote relates an encounter in the Church of the Annunciation in Florence with an American artist who dismisses a group of monks as “a set of rascals,” and this provides Haskins with
one among many facts that have convinced me of how little value are the opinions and judgments of Protestants, though otherwise intelligent and agreeable men, on all questions touching the faith of Catholics. Is it that, with all their pains and money expended in the attainment of a collegiate education, they have, after all, only acquired a vast amount of IGNORANCE? Is it that all their intelligence, and refinement, and polite accomplishments, are a mere external whitening? Is it that, though adopting Christian names, they are, in fact, no better at heart than the equally polished and accomplished gentlemen of the age of Cæsar Augustus?20
As a counterweight to Protestant worldliness and spiritual laxity, Haskins notes that any “reflecting and unprejudiced tourist in Ireland” cannot help but admire the people’s “shining virtue” and firm and inflexible attachment to the Catholic faith.21 Haskins represents a widespread understanding among many contemporary Irish Catholic clergy in America of a natural convergence of an Irish identity and genuine American ideals, rather than a collision of disparate cultures. Indeed, at the center of his American teleology is the incorporation of Irish ethnicity—of these “apostles of Christianity,” “destined to be the pioneers and heralds of the true faith.”22 When it comes to ensuring the inviolable conservation of the American Constitution, Haskins insists that the Irish are the “essential auxiliaries,” having “abjured and cast away the constitution of England”: “Fuse them into the American character, and I know of no people on the Earth that would stand forth on the pages of history at once so dignified, so virtuous, so brave, so illustrious.”23
There is little if any evidence that Connary thought along the lines of the opinionated Haskins, or sympathized much with his rhetoric of sectarianism and indignation. As the next chapters will show, Connary’s interests lay elsewhere, especially in silent, pragmatic assimilation into New Hampshire village life and its institutions, in local church life, and in the day-to-day management, practical and spiritual, of a sizeable family homestead.
Connary’s copy of Haskins’s Travels is an octavo volume in quarter leather and maroon cloth binding, with blind-stamped border design to the boards and gilt lettering on the spine. It is evident that Connary accorded no special value to the thirteen pages of advertisements at the rear of the volume, because copious newspaper and magazine clippings have been pasted across advertised titles (the subject of some discussion in the next chapter). The annotation and leaves inserted by Connary are much less extensive than in, for instance, Balmes’s Fundamental Philosophy or Kinane’s Dove of the Tabernacle. They consist mostly of his routine prayers, religious assertions, and some diary recordings, with no direct association to, or commentary on, Haskins’s text.
A note by Thomas Connary in The Sinner’s Guide (and found in several other volumes) states that “I had the same work in my native home, Old Ireland,” and it provides some insight into the tandem nature of European and North American Catholic print enterprises. Donahoe’s declared aim, as we saw, was to “reproduce many of the very valuable works issued from time to time in Europe.” For Connary, the reacquisition of Catholic literature was motivated in part by nostalgia, by a desire to be once again with the books available in “Old Ireland” that helped structure early religious education, and in part by a perceived need for spiritual guidance and catechetical instruction in the new setting of his New Hampshire family homestead.
We need to recognize, too, the central importance of newspapers and magazines, from which Connary pasted innumerable clippings—on a wide range of subjects—into his books wherever blank space allowed. The key publication here is the Boston Pilot, which was to become the official newspaper for the Archdiocese of Boston, published weekly since 1829 and an important organ for Catholic opinion, particularly with the Irish in New England.24 From 1838 until his death in 1901, Patrick Donahoe was the editor and proprietor of the Pilot, which remains in print to this day as one of America’s oldest Catholic newspapers. An advertisement at the back of Haskins’s Travels of 1856 offers a subscription to the newspaper “at the low price of $2.50 a year” and advertises the Pilot as “a journal devoted to the welfare of the Irish race in America. It contains news from all parts of Ireland, and other countries, and is a faithful guide to the emigrant in his new home.” Also represented in Connary’s compendium of newspaper and magazine items are clippings from the Boston Weekly Globe (published from 1873 until 1892, when it was absorbed by the Boston Daily Globe), as well as the more local Coös Republican (published 1855–81, from Lancaster, New Hampshire), and the People and Patriot (1883–92, from Concord, New Hampshire). In the copy of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, we find inserted correspondence to and from the Pilot and the Coös County Democrat pertaining to Connary’s settlement of subscription fees and the purchase of almanacs.25 In the same volume is found Connary’s own duplicate copy of a letter dated November 24, 1884, that was sent to the publishers of the New England Homestead, opening thus: “Though I have now much more papers and books than I have time to read I send thirty cents to you in this, that you may let me have in justice to yourselves for it a few numbers of your paper.”26
Worthy of note is the diverse nature of Connary’s newspaper and journal subscriptions, which included papers from both sides of the sectarian divide as well as widely disseminated New England papers and more local, parochial periodicals. Connary might well have been heeding advice such as that in Rev. John O’Hanlon’s Irish Emigrant’s Guide for the United States (published by Donahoe in 1851 and in Connary’s library) concerning household reading and newspaper subscription: “The trifling expense of a dollar to two or three a year, will not be an object with most men, and the amount of intelligence communicated both to himself and the members of his family, will amply compensate him for the outlay. It should be observed that if this paper be a religious one, he should subscribe for that published in or near his own diocese, if only to encourage the efforts of a local Catholic press.”27 Connary reads periodicals as someone with the responsibility for the practical and spiritual management of a household, but also, it appears, as someone who strives towards some balance in the loyalties and affiliations of his subscriptions. The appendix provides a fuller list of the newspapers, periodicals, and other miscellaneous papers referred to and purchased by Connary.
Reading for Guidance and Edification: “Book Keeping” in the Connary Household
When we turn our attention from Connary’s use of newspapers and periodicals to the range of books acquired by him, we notice the predominance of what we may tentatively categorize as a literature of religious guidance and practical guidance on matters such as farming and household management. Needless to say, any distinction between practical and religious guidance is not an absolute one: in fact, much of the interest of this archive of reading material stems from precisely the way in which the categories overlap, and are understood by the owner to overlap, within his extensive reading program.
In the area of practical guidance, we find writing useful to someone with responsibility for the moral and corporeal welfare of a household. Titles referred to by Connary as Youth’s Director and The Duties of Young Men would have guided the instruction of adolescent and young adult family members.28 Equally practical, if rather more mundanely so, is a selection of books on agriculture and livestock, including The Farmer’s Treasure: A Practical Treatise on the Nature and Value of Manures, by Frederic Falkner, and two titles referred to as The Farmer’s Own Book and The Complete Farmer.29 In addition, we find in Connary’s library an array of titles that would have provided broader guidance to life in America and the immigrant experience. Among these are a number of introductions to American history and society, as well as the voluminous New Hampshire as It Is, comprising information on geography, demographics, and industrial and humanitarian assets, together with numerous biographical sketches of distinguished individuals.30
The volume referred to as “O’Hanlon’s ’Guide,’” in all probability John O’Hanlon’s Irish Emigrant’s Guide, would have provided detailed and practical guidance for life, work, and social participation in the adopted country. As Hanlon equips his fellow Irishman with a realistic and pragmatic manual for survival, he urges both the acknowledgment of the “most noted and objectionable traits of Irish character” (a certain “want of determination,” some “intemperance,” an occasional “lack of sober reflection,” and “a tendency to crowd into cities and be engaged in large bodies on public works”), as well as the “preservation of religious principles and independence.”31 The self-reliant and industrious Irish expatriate is encouraged to participate in American life while preserving his religious character and maintaining his sacred rootedness in the family. This ideal of peaceful assimilation is embodied in the life of Thomas Connary, and it is framed by O’Hanlon in terms of purposefulness and a predetermined naturalization. Recalling Haskins in his Travels, O’Hanlon opines that
of all other strangers, the educated Irishman finds himself most at home in the United States,—he seems to have been destined by nature for a participation in the active and business pursuits of the country, and in the benefits and advantages derived from its laws and institutions. His innate feelings and disposition, moreover, seem to be almost congenial to the habits and general character of the people amongst whom he is called upon to reside; and no man takes a deeper and more abiding interest in the honor, prosperity and institutions of the country of his adoption. Even the uneducated classes of Irishmen are actuated by like motives and impulses.32
When we turn to Connary’s collection of religious guidance literature—the overwhelming majority of his books and clearly where he invested most of his efforts as a book collector and annotator—we find a body of complex and diversified discourses that cuts across literary genres. Predominant are texts of didactic, catechetical instruction and Bible history. Connary refers several times to “my little illustrated Catechism of 183 pages” and “Catechism of the Council of Trent.”33 James O’Leary’s A History of the Bible, Its Origin, Object and Structure, printed by D. & J. Sadlier in New York in 1873, provides a compendious 483-page introduction to the scriptures. These are all titles that would have strengthened Connary’s religious knowledge and aided him in the religious instruction of his household: they reflect the didactic and catechetic priorities of someone functioning as a kind of estate manager with a degree of pastoral responsibility within his tight-knit family unit. O’Hanlon, in his Irish Emigrant’s Guide, envisages precisely such a role for the head of the household: “It will be the duty of all heads of families to place those under their charge within the rank of religious instruction, to see that they are careful in discharging the duties of religion required of them, to keep them from the contamination of evil influences, particularly those that might endanger or weaken the ties that bind them to our Holy Church” (178).
Two other texts in Connary’s library that would help construe such domestic religious instruction are Bourdaloue’s Sermons and Moral Discourses in the Important Duties of Christianity and Comtesse Elizabeth de Bodenham’s Mrs. Herbert and the Villagers: or, Familiar Conversations on the Principal Duties of Christianity. The latter two-volume work was praised in 1824 by the English Catholic Spectator as likely to “commence a new era in the History of British Catholic Literature” and as an important contribution to the “art of dramatising instruction.”34 Structured according to the sacraments and the Ten Commandments, Bodenham’s text consists of a series of dialogues in which the maternal figure of Mrs. Herbert addresses the confusion and misunderstandings of villagers with her exemplary Christian learning, humility, and patience. It is not difficult to imagine how the extended didactic counsels in the text could serve as applicable models for religious instruction within the household.
Another significant portion of Connary’s works of religious guidance consists of devotional works, hagiographic works, and prayer books. These varied literary forms were designed to enhance pious sentiment and structure a life of prayer. Classic titles such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, St. Francis of Sales’s Spiritual Conferences, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, and The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude lend themselves to private concentrated reading, as evidenced by the rich annotation and many inserted pages of religious reflections. The book entitled Memories of a Guardian Angel, translated from the French of Guillaume Chardon, provides another interesting example of Connary’s devotional literature. Consisting of eighty-eight brief ruminations on themes from the Christian life and its spiritual tribulations, the work draws on a range of patristic writings, saints’ revelations, and “the safest mystical writers” to expound Catholic teaching on the ministry of guardian angels. Inserted handwritten pages in this volume indicate that it provided Connary with much consolation and reassurance. A note from 1875 on the first page of the text offers interesting clues to the possible shared use of the book in the Connary household; it also indicates that Connary purchased the book, originally published in Baltimore by John Murphy, from the well-stocked bookshop of Patrick Donahoe.
Thomas Connary’s Book.
Stratford, Coös County, New Hampshire, October 5, 1875, Received this day from Mr. Patrick Donahoe of Boston, Massachusetts, which I wish to use and have the member of my family circle use as a pure blessed treasure always, never to be sold for money or measured by frail temporal treasures of any kind under any circumstances.
Thomas Connary.
Several other volumes indicate similar patterns of shared reading in the Connary household, and these will be the subject of further discussion in chapter 3. Some of the volumes evidently shared between family members relate the lives of saints and have been thoroughly annotated by Connary, often with handwritten addresses and appeals to his children. Two such titles are The Lives of Eminent Saints, published by Donahoe in 1853, and The Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, from Fielding Lucas Jr. in Baltimore (undated).
One final important group of Connary’s works of religious guidance reminds us that this was a time of pervasive religious and social controversy: it consists of titles from the rich array of Catholic apologetics and religious polemic readily available to Catholic audiences in America. Not all of the religious polemic that we find in Connary’s library is as restrained as Gaston de Ségur’s Plain Talk, which opens thus: “My plain talk on Protestantism is with Catholics, rather than with Protestants. It is not an attack, nor a controversy either; it is intended as a work of preservation and self-defence.”35 Unambiguous controversy and real asperity of language are found in The End of Religious Controversy by the English Catholic bishop and polemicist John Milner (1752–1826), a work that Connary refers to frequently (mostly by title only) in his notes. Published in 1818, but written about twenty years before, this tract spurred a flood of embittered answers in the form of pamphlets and counter-polemics in the decades that followed. We can also include in the category of Christian polemic Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, by John Newman (who was appointed cardinal in 1879) which Connary has in the edition printed by Donahoe in 1853, as well as Haskins’s Travels, so rich in defense and Protestant criticism. An American polemic in Connary’s library is the 472-page Controversy between Rev. Messrs. Hughes and Breckenridge, on the Subject “Is the Protestant Religion the Religion of Christ?,” a lengthy exchange as tedious as it is puerile between the Catholic clergyman who was to become the archbishop of New York and a distinguished Presbyterian minister who had served as chaplain of the House of Representatives. Originally a debate carried out in various Catholic and Presbyterian newspapers, this was published in book form in 1833 by various publishers in Philadelphia and reprinted numerous times in the United States.36 In the early part of the correspondence, Hughes indicates the centrality of the publishing media to the dissemination of the debate: “’The Presbyterian’ will continue to publish until one or the other of us, think proper to decline the contest. I, on my part, shall have the whole re-published in one of our papers, so that the Catholics may receive the enlightenment of your arguments.”37 Connary’s copy of this voluminous controversy is that published by Eugene Cummiskey of Philadelphia in 1864 (sixth edition); on the front flyleaf, he notes, “February 4, 1865 bought of Patrick Donahoe Boston. Price $1.50.”38 As I shall discuss in chapters 4 and 5, Connary, who acquired a rich selection of polemic and defense writing, shows little direct concern with schism and reciprocated animosity. He appears instead to be interested in shared teaching between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps as a result of settling as the first Catholic resident in a small New Hampshire town, his predominant interest is in the nature of the different creeds and in the common ground for the devotional life.
Connary’s activity of “Book keeping” is largely guided by the practical requirements for religious instruction and a desired integration of temporal and spiritual governance. If Connary’s library is designed to resolve any potential crisis or dilemma, it is how to be truly and deeply spiritual while being devoted to the effective management of a household and agriculture—in other words, how to reconcile an inward spiritual ambition with care for the physical, spiritual, and moral lives of one’s dependents. A process of book collecting that is preoccupied with such questions generates its own logic, one in which the “farmer’s treasure” can allude both to Falkner’s agricultural manual and to Kinane’s Dove of the Tabernacle, the small-sized devotional book that was one of Connary’s most precious possessions and has survived filled to the brim with inserted pages of prayers, religious reflections, and exhortations.
Another feature of such “Book keeping,” as noted above, is the relative lack of recreational reading. The genres of poetry, novel, and short story are largely absent. Rather surprising, perhaps, is the fact that we find none of the moral and didactic stories of Mary Anne Sadlier, whom Charles Fanning has characterized as “the fictional advisor to the Famine immigrants.”39 Perhaps Connary found the depressing urban setting of many of her novels, which often have the disillusioned protagonist return to live in Ireland, to be at odds with his own, largely positive, American experience.40 More likely, however, is that Connary simply was not drawn to the fictional mode of writing, preferring instead to be informed and instructed through the more unambiguous means of reference works, history books, and devotional and didactic tracts.
We find in his library a copy of Aesop’s Fables—a genre didactic by definition, intended to instruct and delight—and it is clear that at least parts of this text were read carefully as a source of moral edification. Edward W. Martin’s Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City, steeped in heavy-handed didacticism and not without sensationalism, suggests that reading for entertainment and moral strengthening could go hand in hand. Another title referred to by Connary, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, Made under Direction of the Navy Department, appears to appeal to a curiosity about strange and exotic places and suggests occasional priorities other than a strictly didactic one. The same can probably be said about the rich selection of reference works—dictionaries, historical overviews, topographical guides, and the like—that we know was also in Connary’s possession.
I have characterized the contents of Connary’s library as a literature of guidance, comprising diverse modes of instruction and a variety of textual forms. The overwhelming majority of texts can be classified broadly as devotional, catechetic, or didactic religious literature, a literature that could help produce configurations of religious and moral discipline and ensure a workable balance between an inner spiritual life and practical worldly management. Towards the end of his Irish Emigrant’s Guide, O’Hanlon emphasizes the importance for the Irish immigrant of securing private property and the essential “requisites of life”: “[O]nce his homestead has been secured in the country, he will live contented and respected, and have the satisfaction of seeing his family grow up around him prosperous and industrious, and removed from the pestilential examples and practices of city life.”41 Secure in his New Hampshire homestead and surrounded by family, Thomas Connary dedicated the last decades of his life to the precious and laborious process of “Book keeping,” in which books were collected, arranged, decorated, and annotated. As we shall now explore in detail, this Irish immigrant farmer’s library serves as a guide to, and is an elaborate product of, lived religious experience.
